A love letter to all the chronic relapsers out there

when you just can't stop drinking

I was reminded yesterday of the particular pain of relapse after a moderate-ish (some months) period of sobriety.

The day after my final relapse, I reached out to a sober friend. She and I agreed that if I couldn’t figure it out this last time, I would go to rehab, for real. I was a single mother of three at the time, and rehab didn’t seem very practical (not to mention I had no health insurance). My god, I remember thinking, I will never, ever get this thing.

Another thing she said to me : You deserve a life that is happy, joyous, and free. Don’t settle for anything less.

And then the days started accumulating. I beat my original “personal best” of 124 days. And I kept going. I’m now just 29 days (confirmed by a quick check on my sober counter) shy of joining the “comma club,” (1,000 days sober).

So, Dear Chronic Relapser**, you are not broken, — and this is what I want to say to you, or, perhaps, what I want to say to myself, almost three years ago:

**it’s not even necessary to carry the label “chronic relapser” with you. For me, it took the sting out of the fact that I just couldn’t. Fucking. Figure. It. Out. Until I did.

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Your sober time is not gone

I remember thinking, Poof, it’s gone. “Three (or one/two/four) months (days/weeks/years) down the drain,” is a common refrain.

Your accrued time is NOT down the drain. Your consecutive time, sure, if you want to be that linear about it. I tend to think this comes from the all-or-nothing approach of AA, or even perhaps from the “chip system” in AA. But :

Nothing is wasted. Every morning/day/evening/night spent sober was building the sober muscle. Some people love day counts, some people don’t (see my recent posts with some words from me and people smarter than me on how data does or doesn’t work for them — Part I and Part II).

I remember staring at my sober counter and thinking, oh my fucking god, if I have to reset this thing one more time.

And then it became a reason to not have a “day one.” I’ll just drink again, today, I’d think. Maybe tomorrow.

But by the time I was relapsing after a few months of accumulated time, I had had a taste of freedom from alcohol. And that’s really what it is — it’s freedom. I had felt good. I had felt physically better. I had gone to restaurants and not ordered a cocktail, I had gone to sleep without a beer, I had had hard conversations.

I had brushed my teeth and washed my face and tucked my sons in and my god it had felt good.

The muscle memory was forming there — and what was formed is not lost. It is more like what Annie Grace calls a data point.

No need to beat yourself up — at this point, all you can do is observe, without judgement, your feelings, and be honest with yourself about what happened, and why.

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Get Practical

Create the littlest barriers to prevent yourself from taking a drink. I, for instance, could not have possibly have had alcohol in my house. I know women (and men) who have gotten sober with an active alcoholic/actively drinking partner — I have so, so much respect for people who could do that.

I also had to get honest about this : I am impulsive.

In sobriety, as I have written about, I have continued to observe my impulsive behavior. When I was still smoking cigarettes, if I knew — just the fact that I knew — it was in the house, I would be waiting until I could go outside — and I felt deliriously safe, lulled into a false sense of comfort, that if feeling got to be just a bit too much — that I had those cigarettes.

Since I quit smoking — when I open the cupboard, where I hide my sweet treats from the kids, I’ll just sneak one . Just a nip, as someone might say of the bottle that is sitting in the cupboard. Just a little sip. Just a handful of M&Ms.

So I had to have a house free of alcohol.

I had to mix up my routines. I didn’t pass a liquor store, so I didn’t start taking a different route home from work, as I have heard suggested, but I did stop shopping after 4pm.

I didn’t go to the restaurant. Really, I didn’t leave the house much once I got home from work. And it felt good. It felt safe, in those early days.

Set a timer for 30 minutes, 10 minutes, 2 minutes. (See some more practical tips here).

I am also working on staying off my phone. I have downloaded these little apps that function almost as pop-ups and ask me, Are you sure you want to look at (Instagram/Facebook/something that I, myself, have identified as a total waste of my time?) And a lot of the time I click out of it.

It won’t always be that way. But in the early days, my god, it was so important for me to have those little barriers to just stave off the instant gratification, to just delay the impulse, just for a minute, until the craving passed.

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It’s not that bad — actually, yes, it IS that bad.

During these last few relapses, I would say : well, it wasn’t that bad. I had no DUIs, no no lost jobs, no prison time — nothing to hold in my hand and say, this is really bad. Sometimes I had a big bruise on my thigh, or my arm, or my tailbone hurt from a fall, but who didn’t fall down sometimes and forget what had happened. What’s a blackout here, a few hours missing there.

When I was still struggling to string together 2-3 days at a time, I remember hearing someone on a meeting tell a story about her sister. The sister had relapsed, and she had gone up the stairs to bed, and as she turned to look back, and she slipped and tripped and fell down the stairs. And she died.

Died. It seems impossible to grasp. How many times I was spared, how many times I didn’t die, how fortunate I was. And how, those little relapses, those, it’s not so bad’s — how it could have ended that way : this is not to scare you. This is a reminder : we are all, all of us, only mortal.

I envision a grand, winding staircase. The thump, thump down the stairs. Somehow in my minds’ eye I see someone from the 20s, probably Zelda Fitzgerald. A beautiful, young, vibrant woman.

There was something that eventually happened, which frankly I still have not figured out, where I got it from my intellectual brain to my heart that one drink was the end.

To drink is to die.

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The Only Question you need to ask

Is this moving me towards a drink or away from a drink?

This is the only question you need to ask in the early days.

And, at that point, if the answer yes, that behavior is moving me towards a drink : you need to learn to choose different.

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The last thing I would say to myself : People who love themselves do not try to destroy themselves. So I had to ask myself : why do I not love myself? And then I asked myself, don’t my sons deserve a mother who loves herself? And don’t I want to teach my boys to love themselves, and to teach them, don’t I need to walk the walk, and actually live a life that reflects those principles, that shows that I do, in fact, give a shit about myself, and beyond giving a shit, maybe I even love myself?

So, look at this note below, and now say to that yourself over, and over, and over again. And remember this: you have worth just by virtue of being human. There’s nothing you need to do or not to do have worth.

You, just your living, breathing self — you have inherent, not-needing-to-earn-it-at-all worth.

And soon, your whole world will crack wide open. And, you’ll be able to look at bigger questions, like Mary Oliver’s : “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

I guarantee the answer is not spending it in a blackout.

Now, say this to yourself over and over again

**The phrases “To drink is to die” and a life that is “happy, joyous, and free” are well known phrases from the Big Book (of Alcoholics Anonymous). If you need help working your way through a 90-year-old text that is, quite dated, but personally attacked me, check out my essay here.